Do Guns Improve Safety?

 

On the face of it, the idea that guns improve safety seems appealing. If you’ve got a gun in your pocket, the reasoning goes, you are less likely to be robbed, beaten or shot yourself and even killed. Is this a legitimate argument? I’d say it is certainly not a legitimate argument. Guns are not safety devices. As a general rule with few exceptions, having one in your pocket does not increase your safety.

 

How can that be so? There is no doubt that producing a gun from your pocket can ward off robbers, rapists and other attackers and potential attackers. Some studies based on self-reports indicate that this or something like it happens hundreds of thousands of times a year in the United States. Critics suggest that many of these cases involve instances of two people arguing and both going to get their guns, or a case of someone hearing a noise and fetching a firearm without ever perceiving an actual imminent threat or hearing additional noises. These are arguably not very convincing instances of guns being used as safety devices, but we’ll leave that alone for the moment.

 

Let’s accept that having a gun can, in certain circumstances, including when you are being attacked, improve your safety. However, what about the rest of the time? Do guns improve safety?

 

To answer this question, I looked first at the number of people killed in justifiable homicides by gun-toting citizens. This means the person killed was in the act of committing a felony, and the person doing the killing used a firearm and was not a law enforcement officer. There were an average of 212 cases of this kind of justifiable homicide in the United States from 2006 through 2010, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I looked at deaths, instead of injuries or instances of a criminal being frightened off by a gun-waving citizen, first because killing someone is a very serious event and also because deaths are closely tracked. As a rule, no one dies without it being noticed and investigated. Homicides are commonly used by criminologists to track overall violent crime rates.

 

Next, I looked at the number of people who are killed in accidental shootings. In 2012 this number, according to the Centers for Disease Control, was 591. You see where I’m heading with this? There are nearly three times as many (2.78 times as many, to be precise) people killed accidentally by guns as there are intentionally killed by citizens in justifiable homicides.

 

We are told that a gun is a device that improves safety by providing people who carry one with the ability to kill anyone they perceive as a threat. However, when we look at the best available data, it turns out that a gun is more likely to accidentally kill someone than to intentionally kill someone in a justifiable homicide. So how can a gun be a safety device?

 

One answer is that in certain circumstances, it is. If you are an illegal drug dealer, mob enforcer, police officer, undercover agent, armored car guard or live or work in an area where violent crime is truly rampant, a gun could conceivably improve your safety. Those are very small populations, however. For the rest of us, a gun is a danger device, not a safety device.

 

I own guns for hunting, but I do not consider them safety devices or have any plan for using them for home defense or some similar use. I keep the guns unloaded at one end of the house and the ammunition at the other. When I have a gun in my hand or in my car, I feel less safe, not more. That’s because I live in the real world, not a world of fantasy.

 

This is not a perfect analysis. The CDC does not track justifiable firearms homicides by civilians. The FBI does not track accidental shootings. So it’s not possible, as far as I can tell, to compare data from the same source or survey in order to find out whether more people die from justifiable homicide or accidental shootings. That would be the best way to do it, because the FBI and CDC are using different methods of data-gathering and analysis, and it’s possible that those different methods explain some or all of the difference in the number of accidental firearm deaths and justifiable firearm homicides. However, we don’t have better data. And this data is not that bad. These are the places you go to get information on these topics. And their message is clear.

 

The evidence pretty clearly shows that guns are not safety devices. Seat belts are safety devices. They save thousands of lives per year and take very few. Guns are devices intended for shooting, wounding and killing. Incidentally, in some instances they may improve safety. However, as a rule, they do not. If you carry a gun and that gun is used to kill someone, all things being equal, the odds that the person killed will be someone you don’t want killed — like yourself, your child, a friend or other innocent person — are about three times higher than the chances you’ll use it to kill someone who you perceive as a threat.